Woody Harrelson: A vegetarian among carnivores

Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Woody Harrelson in a scene from "Zombieland."

Woody Harrelson wouldn't make a good zombie.

He's a vegetarian, after all, and won't eat a hamburger, let alone his neighbor.

So it's a good thing that in the new film "Zombieland" he doesn't play a zombie. Even so, though, his eating habits made things hard for the film's producers.

"My character is searching for the ultimate comfort food, which to him is not another human being but a Twinkie," the 48-year-old actor said, speaking by telephone from a Los Angeles hotel. "I'm not a Twinkie lover. I don't do sugar or dairy either. When we finally shot my Twinkie-eating scene in the movie, they had to give me a specially made mock Twinkie made of corn meal.

"It could spur a healthy Twinkie revolution."

So, if Harrelson were looking for comfort food while the world was coming to an end, what would it be?

"I'd be searching for a mango," he said. "Or an avocado. It really is a tough call between the two."

In "Zombieland" a virus has turned most of the world's humans into cannibal monsters. Harrelson plays a tough cookie named Tallahassee, a loner who seems to enjoy wiping out zombies with the large arsenal of guns he keeps in his truck. During his Twinkie quest he runs into Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and two sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The four reluctantly decide to team up to fend off the walking dead and ultimately find a place where they'll be safe.

Critics are calling the film a sleeper hit and praising Harrelson's performance as his best in years - which is ironic, since he almost passed on it without even reading the script.

"I was sent this 'Zombieland' script," he recalled, "and I couldn't imagine it being good. Let's be totally honest here. Just look at the name. That could be a real stupid movie."

It was only at his agent's urging that he even opened the script.

"It was genius," he said. "This isn't just some blood bath. The movie is funny and the characters are so interesting."

So he signed on and soon was facing off against an army of zombies.

"They did look like zombies," Harrelson said. "And it was easy to go after them, because all I had to do was think about the last administration in the United States. Just that thought alone put me in a vicious mood."

The climactic showdown at a zombie-infested amusement park took three weeks of night shooting, which wasn't Harrelson's idea of a good time.

"It is difficult for me to stay up all night when I'm not breaking the rules," he said. "When it's mandatory that I stay up, it's tougher. Three weeks of shooting zombies, and I wasn't sure what it would look like on screen. But we really did pull it off."

In one offbeat scene the foursome are roaming Beverly Hills and stumble across the mansion of Bill Murray. When they see his pasty, craggy face, they assume that he's a zombie and prepare to kill him only to realize that it's simply the way he looks.

"I had a lot to do with Bill doing that role in the movie," Harrelson said. "I called him and kept luring him into it. Originally we went to his house and he was a zombie, so we killed him. Finding a non-infected Bill was so much funnier."

Recently Harrelson snuck into an early screening of "Zombieland" in Orange County, Calif.

"I thought, 'Now, this could be rough,' " he admitted. "I get nervous when I see my movies with an audience, but pretty quickly I was real happy here. The movie played like a beautiful rock concert, but with big laughs. It gave me the feeling of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' (1975)."

He expects audiences to be in a more somber mood when his next film, "The Messenger," debuts on Oct. 30.

The film stars Harrelson and Ben Foster as Army officers with a singularly unpleasant job: telling military families, face to face, that their sons or daughters have died overseas.

"I'm a casualty-notification officer," Harrelson said. "It was a role where I really immersed myself."

In preparing for the part, Harrelson studied photos of men and women who had become casualties of the war in Iraq.

"I had to look at the faces of young women and men who were killed in Iraq," he said, "and then I couldn't stop looking. This really affected me to the core, but it helped put me in the mind set of the character.

"I can imagine this war a little better now," the actor said. "It's easy to say that you're anti-war or pro-peace, but it's important to get the perspective of the warrior.

"I'm a big fan of the men and women who put their lives on the line every single day," he said. "I still believe the war is absolutely wrong, but I have the utmost respect for the warrior."

Harrelson spent his youth in Lebanon, Ohio, growing up with a troubled family life. To this day Harrelson won't talk about his father, Charles Harrelson, who is serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, John Howland Wood.

Perhaps to escape the reality of his life, Harrelson gravitated early to theater. After receiving a degree in theater arts from Hanover College in Indiana, he moved to New York and soon was hired as an understudy in the Broadway production of Neil Simon's "Biloxi Blues" (1985).

A few months later he hit the jackpot when he was cast as the clueless Woody on the television series "Cheers." The show would run until 1993 and, like its tagline said, everyone in Hollywood knew Harrelson's name. He quickly landed supporting roles in such films as "Wildcats" (1986) and "Doc Hollywood" (1991).

Incidentally, Harrelson says that there's nothing to rumors of a "Cheers" reunion for a theatrical film.

"It was good while it lasted," he says, "but it would be like beating a dead horse."